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What Is Manufacturer's Minimum Advertised Pricing?
Some of our products display the Manufacturer's Minimum Advertised Price, but we ask you to add the product to your shopping cart to see our price. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Manufacturers like to keep the price of their products up so there is more profit in them, especially for larger retailers. They don't want smaller sellers undercutting their big retail accounts. However, price fixing, or telling a merchant at what price they can or cannot sell a product is illegal.
To get around this, many manufacturers have established "Minimum Advertised Pricing" or MAP. The manufacturer tells the retailer that if they advertise a product at a price below a certain amount they will no longer sell the retailer the product. Certainly this violates the spirit of the law against price fixing, but it is nevertheless legal for the manufacturer to do this.
To make matters worse, manufacturer enforcement of MAP policies is generally very sporadic and arbitrary causing a retailer huge problems when MAP is enforced on him or her, but not on his or her competitors. That is why you will see some web sites that display MAP pricing and others that don't.
Regardless of MAP policies, a manufacturer still cannot legally tell a retailer at what price to sell a product. To avoid problems we display the MAP price of a product on our site, but when you add it to your shopping cart you can see our price. You can always remove the product from your cart after you add it.
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